Engadget got the chance to sit down with Jonathan Schwartz, the pony-tailed CEO of Sun Microsystems. Being the gadget blog that they are, Engadget asked Schwartz about the long-missing JavaFX Mobile platform Sun has promised, Java on the iPhone, and competing with Microsoft as an open source vendor.

The US market from one side, the Linux and Google from other side makes Sun to lose a lot of it's strength. The Core2 CPU from Intel makes Sparc CPU not so attractive, and AMD based solutions are lower on performance that equivalent Xeon CPUs. So most software goes on outsourcing and opensourcing as Sun and Novel does.
Swartz anyway has a lot of achievements from Sun like promoting Java, make it opensource, promoting Netbeans and make Eclipse project to attach to Netbeans foundation. Mostly, looking over the windows, you can see the sun, in freedom.

Sun has an excellent offering in a number of areas. For webservers, databases and file servers the T1000, and T2000 are ahead of anything else especially in terms of performance per Watt but in general any application where you need a lot of threads. With AMD they have a competitive HPC offering.

... they couldn't ask him about the $34 million loss and the 2500 jobs to be axed.

Indeed. That would have been a more pertinent and interesting question, rather than getting bizarre and totally meaningless answers about the iPhone (Sun has a fixation about being Apple for some reason), as well as asking Jonathan how he intends to solve those problems. It's like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic while the band plays some nice ragtime tunes. However, I suppose the interview displays Sun's current status: "What the hell are we going to do?" Novell has much the same problem.

I find it amusing, and not so amusing for the employees themselves, that Sun simply doesn't know how to do redundancies:

The golden rule of redundancies is to itemise everything that you need and don't need, get the relevant people told as quickly as possible, and above all, make sure you do it once, and once only. This constant round of layoffs that Sun has every year, or every few months, is destroying the ability of the people left to get any work done. Drip feeding layoffs, quite apart from any other problems you have, can destroy a company itself. Would you work under that? Even funnier, Sun is one of those daft companies that fires people that they eventually realise they need to do some work twelve months later. Comments by some 'anonymous' people here:

Sadly, Sun still believes that its multi-billion dollar revenues and spending from the 90s and around the dot-com boom are sustainable - if only they can fire a whole load of people. For a company with their revenues, a $34 million loss or a $67 million profit is woeful. They're barely breaking even as revenues fall. Getting rid of people isn't enough, as it's pretty clear that their expenses are just far too high. Daft purchases such as MySQL and Innotek are partly to blame, but they're not the whole story.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader, and Jonathan, to work this one out, considering that by various metrics a good three quarters of the servers they manage to sell are x86, and of those, probably a good 70% - 80% have Linux specified as their OS. Unless they can get some returns on their spending on SPARC and Solaris then it's all just dead weight.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader, and Jonathan, to work this one out, considering that by various metrics a good three quarters of the servers they manage to sell are x86, and of those, probably a good 70% - 80% have Linux specified as their OS. Unless they can get some returns on their spending on SPARC and Solaris then it's all just dead weight.

... they couldn't ask him about the $34 million loss and the 2500 jobs to be axed.

Everytime I see 'job cuts' and 'economic slow down/recession' - I have to ask, do these management types see that their actions are actually creating the self fulfilling prophecy of the recession on the horizon? I don't want to turn this into a thread over business but what they should be doing during an economic down turn is pumping money into product investments, increase their product portfolio, hire more engineers and so forth. When the economy does swing up - and customer start demanding more software and hardware - the said company is in a good position to provide those goods and services demanded in a growing economy.

As for OpenSolaris, Java and so forth; its happening gradually, and personally, I'd sooner see it take time to form than trying to rush things out (like we see in the Linux world) of distributions being pushed out to meet a deadline which are riddled up the wazoo with bugs and issues. There is a fine line between wanting to be on the cutting edge and getting out the latest technology - and just being plan stupid when it comes to incorporating things that are damn risky (SELinux, Fedora and numerous driver issues anyone?).